1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to a method and system for automatically maintaining data consistency across various databases. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to a method and system for creating a single file to drive all translation, extraction, verification and promotion operations for maintaining data consistency across various databases in an automated fashion.
2. Description of the Related Art
Currently, circuit design data for integrated circuits is created utilizing several different databases. Because of the need to interface to various software programs, it is often necessary to manually translate the original data in a particular database to other data forms. Additionally, as the circuit design matures, it is frequently necessary to modify certain elements of the original design database. Therefore, it is extremely important to ensure that whatever change is made to the original database is propagated to the derived views. This problem becomes complicated when the original data is comprised of a plurality of individually alterable data records or cell views related to each other in a multiple hierarchical database system. Changes to anyone of the individual data records or cell views may have consequences that impact the integrity of the given hierarchy in which the changed data element of a cell view resides, or to a different but related hierarchical data set. It is frequently the case that a designer involved in a change to one or more data elements is unaware of the full consequences of this change.
In addition, it is desirable to know the quality of the data within a hierarchical database. Standards have been developed and encoded for use in quality control in the form of various software validation routines. However, when the database is changed, it is necessary to re-run these validation routines to ensure that no errors or undesirable qualities resulting in inconsistencies within the database has been introduced.
Consequently, it would be desirable to provide an improved method and system which is able to run independent of any operator intervention that guarantees data consistency across databases and activates software verification routines and performs the tasks necessary to indicate the quality of the data. The present invention solves all of these problems in a new and unique manner that has not been previously known in the art.